Why Putin Still Fights

Why Putin Still Fights

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-putin-still-fights

The Kremlin Will End Its War in Ukraine Only When It Knows That Victory Is Impossible
Lawrence D. Freedman
June 18, 2025

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine and a co-author of the Substack Comment Is Freed.

Nearly five months since U.S. President Donald Trump entered the White House promising to quickly end the war in Ukraine, it is being fought as intensely as before. Russia has not rejected the idea of negotiations, but despite Trump ruling out NATO membership or U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to offer any serious concession to put a deal within reach. At first glance, it is unclear why this is so. After all, the war is now well into its fourth year, and although Russian forces have recently made advances and regularly attack Ukrainian cities with large numbers of drones and missiles, they are still far from achieving Putin’s core objectives. Russian losses have been accumulating at a staggering pace, with as many as 200,000 casualties since the start of 2025 alone. Meanwhile, Ukrainian units have pulled off some stunning operations, including the spectacular June 1 attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force far from the border, and they are increasingly able to use long-range drones to hit military assets and oil facilities inside Russia—challenging any assumptions that Kyiv is on its last legs or that Moscow is close to a decisive breakthrough.

Given that Trump had presented Putin what he assumed to be attractive terms for a cease-fire, he could be forgiven for wondering why the Russian president is being so stubborn. If Putin wanted a way to ease his country out of the war with minimal humiliation, Trump’s offer was as generous as any that a U.S. president is likely to make. A cease-fire would not only allow Russian forces to recuperate after a grueling few years but also potentially get rid of at least some sanctions and provide a chance to normalize relations with the United States.

Yet none of these developments, or the growing economic pressures Russia faces at home, have diminished Putin’s war resolve. Rather than entertain an opportunity for a face-saving cease-fire, Russia has doubled down on fighting. Since late spring, Russia has been attacking Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with some of the largest aerial bombardments of the war. It has stepped up its latest offensive, pushing forward in Donetsk, moving into Sumy, and trying to enter Dnipropetrovsk. In fact, to close observers of the war, Putin’s intransigence and determination to take more territory at whatever the cost is not surprising. But it offers crucial insights into where the war might be headed now and what it might take to end it.
A TEXTBOOK FOREVER WAR

Although it was intended to be over within days, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine soon transformed into an inconclusive, open-ended conflict. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, I addressed the recurring problem in modern warfare of long wars. A central question was how countries cope when wars meant to be short and decisive turn out to be protracted and inconclusive. To end such a war requires both sides to bring military and political objectives into a more realistic alignment. But that becomes harder as a war drags on, with the aggressor now seeking also to avoid the humiliation of defeat and the acknowledgment that the assumptions behind the war were flawed to begin with.

Russia’s war in Ukraine offers a textbook case of this problem. Since its launch in February 2022, it has morphed from a limited “special military operation” into an existential struggle for Russia. After the campaign suffered severe setbacks in the fall of 2022, instead of looking for a way to end the war and cut Russia’s losses, Putin doubled down. In September 2022, he put the country on a war footing and announced the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces in addition to Crimea—even though Russian forces had yet to take these provinces in their entirety (and still have not close to three years later). All this made the war even harder to end. Now one of Moscow’s core demands is that Ukraine must hand over territory that Russia failed to take by force.

As with a flawed military campaign, a flawed diplomatic initiative is apt to start with a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Like Putin in 2022, Trump believed in January 2025 that he could bring the war to a quick conclusion. Putin assumed Kyiv would fall within days of the invasion; Trump claimed he could end the war “in 24 hours.” But Trump soon found that the intractable nature of the conflict meant that he, too, had to cope with a long haul, which is already testing his patience. Although the Kremlin hardly kept its demands a secret, Trump believed Russia would be happy with his proposal of an immediate cease-fire, de facto control of the occupied territories, and Ukraine denied entry to NATO.

So certain was he that Putin would accept these terms that he acted as if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was the main obstacle to agreement. Trump’s first move was to explain publicly to the Ukrainian president the harsh realities of Ukraine’s weak position, especially once U.S. support was withdrawn. “You don’t have the cards,” he told him in an infamous Oval Office meeting at the end of February. When Zelensky objected, the United States even briefly suspended all military and intelligence cooperation with Ukraine to underscore Trump’s point.

Zelensky soon agreed to a cease-fire, in part to mollify Trump but also to give Ukraine some badly needed respite. Yet Putin, despite being assiduously courted by the Trump administration, refused, even as he went to great rhetorical lengths to suggest that he was still keen to work for peace. None of Trump’s generous terms—including renewed business relations between Russia and the United States—seemed to make a difference.

Although Trump insisted that he was prepared to intensify sanctions on Russia if Putin didn’t budge, in practice, the American president gave no indication that he would do so, thereby setting aside the main form of pressure available to the United States. As the spring wore on, Russian and Ukrainian teams did meet for negotiations in Istanbul, but they could agree only on prisoner exchanges. When the two sides exchanged memorandums outlining their requirements for peace, it became clear that Russia was sticking to its maximum demands on Ukrainian territory, sovereignty, disarmament, and international neutrality before a cease-fire could be implemented.
WHY PUTIN PERSISTS

Putin has multiple possible reasons for resisting a cease-fire. First, no issue is more important to him than Ukraine. Ensuring that the country can never be truly independent of Russia is essential to his legacy. Additionally, he does not believe the war to be unwinnable. Despite the grindingly slow progress of Russian forces over the last 18 months, he calculates that Russia’s overall superiority in strength will eventually prove decisive, and that in the end, Ukraine will simply be overwhelmed by Russian power. He also likely views a cease-fire along the current line of contact as inherently unstable. If Russia retained only the territories it currently holds, it would be left occupying an economically inactive, depopulated, damaged chunk of Ukraine that would need to be policed intensely. And the long border with Ukraine would need to be heavily defended.

For Putin, ending the war without meeting his core political objectives would be tantamount to a defeat and would leave the patriotic, ultranationalist bloc that he has cultivated and nurtured during the war deeply angered. The more moderate Russian elite might be relieved by such an outcome, but with so little to show for such a costly effort, there would still be a dangerous reckoning. Many would begin to ask, “Was it worth it?” and to wonder about the fallibility of Russia’s leadership.

And there are other strong motives for Putin to avoid a deal. He would lose face among his most important partners in China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as in those countries of the “global majority” that he has been seeking to impress and even lead. Furthermore, he has committed Russia to the idea that it is engaged in a long-term struggle with the West; accepting even a temporary Ukrainian truce could embolden his NATO adversaries. They might try to take advantage of any sign of weakness. Moreover, Putin knows that any sanctions relief that comes with a cease-fire will be limited and contingent. Even if Trump were inclined to be more generous, the European Union and the United Kingdom would likely resist. Finally, Putin has reason to doubt the great economic deals that Trump promises. Having pulled out of Russia’s unstable and slowing economy, many Western companies and investors will be hesitant to return.

Thus, the perils of losing loom as large as the gains of victory. If Putin thought that Trump might act in a manner that makes losing more likely for Russia, by toughening sanctions or extending military support to Ukraine, he might be inclined to take his proposals more seriously. Instead, the prospect of Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine adds to the Kremlin’s confidence in eventual victory.
HOW UKRAINE RESISTS
For its part, Kyiv believes that it has reached the limits of the concessions it is prepared to make in a cease-fire. It has accepted that it is unlikely to retake the territory that Russia now occupies any time soon, and it understands that it will not be able to join NATO, although that would be the best guarantee of its future security. Yet the Ukrainian government also believes that it is holding its own in the fighting and is ready and able to stay in the war if no cease-fire is in view. The Russians have yet to take towns that were judged sure to fall last summer. They are currently pushing as hard as ever, but even if Kyiv does have to concede more territory, Ukrainian forces can extract an extraordinarily high price for each mile that Russia gains. More troops need to be mobilized, but the situation is far from hopeless, especially as European support is set to increase and the continent’s own defense industry is now producing much of what is needed at the front.

Although the pace of the war has picked up over the past couple of months, Russia has yet to acquire sufficient velocity to transform the situation on the ground. It has been putting more effort into mass missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, which cause damage and pain—and further test Ukraine’s stretched air defenses, but as is often the case with strategic bombing campaigns that play out over time, the target communities adapt and cope. The people of Ukraine have now endured three winters amid energy shortages, but they continue to resist. They know their likely fate if they end up under Moscow’s rule.

If the war in Ukraine is going to end through negotiations, therefore, Putin will need to be convinced not only that his political objectives are unrealistic but also that a failure to reach a deal will result in Russia’s position worsening over time. At present, that is far from clear.

What might make the difference? Moscow must be concerned by the increasing tempo of Ukrainian attacks against an array of military and economic targets on Russian territory. The most spectacular—such as the early June Operation Spider’s Web, using low-tech, short-range drones to destroy more than a dozen Russian strategic bombers at air bases far from the border—were a testament to Ukrainian audacity, operational ingenuity, and technical prowess. Such strikes are embarrassing and disruptive to Russia but still unlikely by themselves to force Moscow to reappraise its war strategy. They also have not fundamentally changed the basic dynamics on the frontlines, although attacks on logistic hubs, arms depots, and command centers certainly help.

Since early in the war, analysts have attempted to work out at what point one side or the other would run out of vital supplies—armored vehicles, artillery pieces, shells, missiles, air defenses, and so on. In some areas, stocks have been seriously depleted. Ammunition is currently less of a problem for Ukraine, but its air defenses are a significant concern. Russia now appears to lack the capacity for maneuver warfare. Yet both sides keep going with help from their friends, and they have relied increasingly on capabilities, notably drones, when domestic mass production is possible and relatively affordable so that expendability is far less of a worry.
The most perplexing issue is manpower. This has been and remains a serious matter for Ukraine. Although numbers are now up (Zelensky claims to be mobilizing 27,000 a month), there is still resistance in Kyiv to conscripting 18-to-24-year-olds. On the Russian side, Moscow accepts heavy casualties for small gains and continues to find troops to send to the front despite the high risk of death and injury. Several Western analyses have concluded that the war has already cost Russia a million casualties.

Russia appears to have a Soviet-style readiness, which arguably goes back to imperial times, to throw troops at enemy defenses in the hope that some will get through. Current Russian strategy, for example, relies on small groups of troops on buggies, bikes, and foot advancing in the knowledge that most will not reach Ukrainian lines but that enough might to occupy some new ground.
Thus far, the Kremlin has found troops without resorting to a full-scale mobilization. This is because of a bounty system that uses hefty—and ever-increasing—payments to recruits. Since recruits largely come from the poorer parts of the country, the war also has a redistributive effect. Russia’s war machine is a bit like an extractive industry, in which as long as there is material that can be mined, it is good business. Still, in the end, the supplies will be limited. There are already doubts about how much more manpower the state can buy and at what price. The question remains whether at some point the Kremlin will have to resort to more coercive methods.

This cost relates to Putin’s wider problem of whether the Russian economy can continue to sustain this level of military effort. Moscow has confounded Western expectations that severe sanctions would wreck the country’s economy and has instead enjoyed a couple of years of high growth. This is the result of a combination of shrewd macroeconomic management, high energy prices, the support of China and other Russian energy clients in circumventing sanctions, and the war boom triggered by enormous defense production. But beginning in late 2024, there were signs that Russia’s militarized economy was beginning to severely overheat, with labor shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates discouraging investment. For the first months of 2025, the Trump-induced downturn in international trade pushed down oil prices, putting further pressure on Russian coffers.
BEYOND DEADLOCK

Ukraine began 2023 hoping that it could win the war with a counteroffensive. When that failed, and with the U.S. Congress refusing to vote for more assistance to Kyiv, Russia was optimistic that it would be able to pull ahead in 2024. Moscow now insists that it can prevail over the long haul. It certainly does not want its enemy to think otherwise. Putin likely still thinks that Ukraine will buckle first, but he has always underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and determination. Perhaps a tipping point will come when Moscow begins to recognize the utter futility of this war and the long-term economic damage to Russia starts to outweigh the costs of acknowledging that the war’s political objective cannot be met. Maybe some future Ukrainian operation will trigger the necessary reappraisal.

The experience of this war, however, underlines the difficulty of getting political leaders to acknowledge failure when their forces have yet to be defeated in the field and when there is no obvious compromise deal waiting to be negotiated. Neither side has a clear-cut route to victory. That is what it means to be in a forever war. It is not evident how it will end, or even if an apparent peace will be no more than an opportunity for Russia to rebuild its forces under the guise of an uneasy cease-fire. This will depend on decisions yet to be made. Ukraine’s Western allies, therefore, must be realistic about the potentially long-term demands entailed in keeping Ukraine in the war. Continuing to deny Russia victory is a form of pressure on Putin, who has so little to show for such a long and calamitous campaign. Although it may be hard to imagine a military defeat for Russia, it is possible to imagine a shift in Ukraine’s favor. If Moscow becomes convinced, contrary to its current expectations, that time is not on its side, perhaps that might yet cause it to wonder whether the moment has come to cut its losses.